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Donald Hall: The Old Master

The former poet laureate says he has been abandoned by the muse of poetry. Perhaps that is why his prose is keener than ever.

By

Edwin Yoder Jr.

Updated Dec. 25, 2014 4:43 p.m. ET

Thomas Mann once observed that “a writer is someone who finds it hard to do what others do easily”—a definitive encapsulation of the need for revision and a lesson that some would-be writers never seem to learn. By Mann’s standard, Donald Hall is a prodigy. In the title piece of “Essays After Eighty”—a collection in which aging is a major theme but hardly the only one—he claims that “some of these essays took more than 80 drafts, some as few as 30.” As for that major theme, Mr. Hall, the hardy octogenarian, moves in some pretty fast literary company—Cicero, for instance, in the consoling pages of his classic essay “De...